> The 13th Amendment would not come into play here, Yes it would be a huge stretch, but I look at copyright/patent law as unjust restrictions on the freedom of

> The 13th Amendment would not come into play here, Yes it would be a huge stretch, but I look at copyright/patent law as unjust restrictions on the freedom of one person by another. > There's more public support for abolishing all private property than there is for abolishing or even limiting copyright. I think this is a really good point. I would say 99/100 of the general population has zero opinion on copyright/patent law, so present day it would fall far low on the list of priorities. > The vast majority of people are apathetic to the issue when it doesn't affect them. You are very much right that people are apathetic to it. But if people weren't affected by it I wouldn't care. I care because I think people are greatly affected by it, though that isn't widely reported. For example, millions of people are strongly affect by the opioid crisis, and if you trace that back to the root cause, what do you find: patent law (Oxycontin was being heavily prescribed over cheap generics like ibuprofen because of an incentive stream due to monopoly profits from patent laws). If you look at healthcare, or the cost of education, or tech consolidation, or the current news industry, all of these problem categories in the USA have a common thread where the industries depend upon copyright/patent laws, with resulting harmful incentives. It's like when you have a software system where you've got the underlying data model wrong. Users will constantly point out the loads of specific easily observable problems but the real root cause and solution is to fix the underlying data model. Why isn't it widely reported on? Well, I could be completely wrong and these laws are a good thing for everyone. Or maybe because the media doesn't amplify the voices who have been researching and promoting this because as the saying goes "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." > This sentiment is toxic. I'm not too sure. I think you could be right, and I think my negative exasperated tone above could be counter productive. But I also think it might help to be direct with creators about the true value of contributions relative to what they are building upon. The success (and humility) in the OSS world is perhaps the way of the future. Successful OSS developers have appropriate humility that they are building mostly on the works of others and give their work away under public domain (ie. sqlite) or permissive licenses like MIT. Very few developers want to use libraries where the authors insist on control. That zeitgeist hasn't yet moved to other creative industries yet though, that I'm aware of. I also think one might win some minds when you make the case that when a janitor cleans a room, she then doesn't get to charge a fee to everyone who enters that room for the next 120 years. Spot on points though. I am not too confident in the odds of success.